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Tuesday, 22 May 2012

Writing Britain - Dianne Hofmeyr

What is landscape to a writer? Waterland, Wuthering Heights, Far From the Madding Crowd are novels
I read a long time ago without ever visiting the terrain and yet the landscape seeped into my consciousness… strong, powerful… never to be forgotten. If we start with books read from childhood,
the list might go on forever of experiencing a landscape for the first time through
the eyes of a writer. And this is what makes the new exhibition at the British
Library: Writing Britain – Wasteland to Wonderland, so fascinating.

Anyone who is slightly voyeuristic (what writers aren’t?) will
find the exhibition utterly intriguing. Access to so many writers’ journals, diaries,
notes, sketches, edits, proofs and musings, is the height of voyeurism. In the
dimly lit quiet rooms it’s like being a ghost peering over the writer’s
shoulder.

Fortify yourself. The exhibition is huge. But as writers or
lovers of books, you’ll be richly rewarded. It moves from rural dreams, to the
satanic mills of industry and from wild places to water lands, the city and places beyond
the city to show how stories are shaped not just by the physical but the
imagined physical. If you have an idea of the extent of the exhibition beforehand,
you can set the pace. A break in the middle for lunch or coffee is a good
option. The dim lighting, lack of bright visuals and... odd to say as a writer –
the predominance of text and need to be up close to each glass case to read the
words, even the stance of reading standing upright, make it tiring. But the
rewards are there.

As I experienced the swirls and loops and fluid flow of ink
from Wordsworth's pen, Bronté’s neat and spidery hand, Katherine Mansfield’s firm
script in her Suburban Fairy tale,
Angela Carter’s italic in her manuscript for Wise Children, the neat child-like hand of Lewis Carroll in his Alice’s Adventure Underground and the
fat cursive letters of Virginia Woolf writing her newspaper as a child – it occurred
to me that I’m becoming unused to deciphering and reading real handwriting.
Will our children’s children lose this skill entirely?

But it’s not just the script and inkblots that makes this
all so personal. It’s the very true feeling of knowing how the writer has
anguished and altered the words – drawings by John Betjeman overlaid with words,
Thomas Hardy’s handwritten insertions on the proof copy of Far from the Madding Crowd, JK Rowling corrections to Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.
And what must come as comforting to any writer the huge red crossings-out of
James Joyce on a handwritten page of Ulysses
where the amount of red far outweighs the written word.

It’s a heady mix. Interviews with writers talking about
landscape, recordings of writers reading their work, poems of Sylvia Plath, Fay
Godwin’s haunting photographs illustrating the moorlands Ted Hughes describes,
Wordsworth writing of his sister Dorothy on their walks, ‘She gave me eyes. She gave me ears.’ The Waterlands of Swift and the Wessex of Hardy are conjured up
alongside the Willesden of Zadie Smith and the bleak visions of modern urban life
as seen in the stark opening lines of J.G. Ballard’s Crash:

Vaughan died yesterday
in his last car-crash.

It’s an exhibition that needs revisiting and each time I’m
sure a new hidden gem will emerge.

What for me was one of the most moving
exhibits was Liz Matthew’s 17 metre concertina book, Thames to Dunkirk, with the names of the Little Boats that went
across to Dunkirk written into the water of the Thames combined below the with
the words from Virginia Woolf’s The Waves
in calligraphy done with a piece of Thames’ driftwood. It seemed to show not
just the spirit of those men in the small boats but also the spirit of writers who dare.

It IS wonderful Sue and worth a visit but needs time and energy. And I've never read The Box of Delights Emma but The Dark is Rising was another of those books where one has a sense of knowing the landscape before ever having set foot in it. I suppose growing up in another country has done this for me. When you see the landscape for the first time, you feel you've been there before in another life.

Last night I read a book by children's author Joan Lennon - one of her "Wickit Chronicles" and was bowled over by her descriptions of Ely and the fens.

Her hero goes punting around in the mist-covered marshes: "Away to the east the sun hung, still low in the sky, making everything spark and glint. The air was thin and bright and smelled of thin ice and the distant tang of the sea..." Wonderfully evocative (and a fantastic and very humorous adventure story).

Dianne, Can you remember if the books in the exhibition are laid flat or tilted up? I ask because I would have to go round it in a wheeelchair, and most exhibition surfaces are precisely eye-level when I'm sitting... it does sound wonderful though.

I wrote Secret Songs exactly because I wanted to put Sunart (west coast Scotland) in a book.